12-04-2012, 05:05 PM
New Technologies in Computer Science Education
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Introduction
Learning and teaching are suffering drastic changes thanks to technology advances in the education field. This is
especially true when talking about computer science. These advances are favoring the emergence of new styles
of learning and teaching [Rei95]. This chapter describes such advances and their impact on education,
particularly computer science, and it also foretells how computer science education will evolve, describing a day
in a 2020 University.
We have identified the following issues related to teaching and learning: lecture (presentation and note taking),
tutoring, courseware, laboratories, grading, search for bibliographical and other pedagogical material resources.
However, the chapter is structured around new technologies, as sometimes a technology has applications in more
than one area. We start by describing the applications of the technology and then the technical aspects of the
technology itself. These are the new technologies we describe:
Multimedia-conferencing
Asynchronous communication media (e-mail, news groups, ftp, etc.) has been widely used in the academic
community. In the last years, with the advent of faster networks new synchronous communication media have
appeared. They are usually referred to as multimedia-conferencing systems.
Multimedia-conferencing supports meetings among people in different locations. The simplest systems only
allow unidirectional communication from a source to multiple people. The most advanced ones allow multi-party
conferencing, so that each participant can participate both passively (by simply watching and hearing) and
actively (by speaking). Technologies discussed in this section are part of a wider area: computer-mediated
communication [Rap91] that deals with the interaction between people by means of computers.
Automatic Grading and Plagiarism Detection
Assignments grading represent a substantial share of the load of many lecturers. There have been many attempts
to diminish this effort while keeping a good quality grading. The automation of project grading involves four
processes: project submission, project grading, plagiarism detection and administrative work. Today,
programming projects are submitted electronically at many universities. In some places the use of the network
only avoids to handle a lot of paper and diskettes. But in other places it is associated to systems that
automatically grade the assignments, store the grades in a database and inform both the instructor and students
about the results. Some of these systems go further and they detect plagiarism. Plagiarism detection is always
interesting, but with automatic grading it becomes mandatory, as the instructor will have little or no contact with
projects.
Project Submission
Project submission can take different forms: diskette, e-mail, web forms and ftp. Diskette submissions are very
rudimentary. The approaches using the network will be the only used, probably in the form of e-mail
attachments. Web forms can help the e-mail management as the student can be requested to fill up a web form
that, in response, will generate a key that will be used to identify the e-mail project submission. Alternative
approaches (especially interesting for big projects) are those based on ftp. In this case the student just sends an email
with its username and password (this is not necessary when the grading system runs on the same system
where projects are developed and it has permissions to access the student accounts). Then the grading system
accesses the student account by means of ftp to copy the project.
Administrative Work
Administrative tasks are the ones related to storing the programming projects and their marks and generating
reports with student marks, statistics and the most frequent errors. Project grades must be stored in a database
together with exam grades. Individual reports are sent to the authors of the project and collective reports to the
instructor. The system checks for deadlines and informs both the student and the instructor if projects are
submitted after the expiration of the deadline. The system can also report on the status of a given student or
group assignment on request by the instructor.
WWW and Internet
With the advent of Internet, sharing digital resources is becoming a true revolution in teaching. By means of
WWW, it is possible to access hypermedia documents integrating (hyper-) text, static images, animations, and
audio, among others [FIP95], as well as hyperlinks to other documents. Web browsers (e. g. Netscape or
Explorer) allow navigating through these resources in an integrated way. In the following subsection, we review
these resources and their educational use; in subsection 4.2, the advantages and difficulties of search in Internet
are focussed, and finally, in subsection 4.2 we consider the educative use of these resources.
Courseware
Nowadays, many courses have Web pages with courseware (notes, programming project statements, etc.). A web
page can serve as the permanent link among students of a particular course, the instructor and the rest of the staff
(laboratory assistants, etc.). Web pages can provide an interactive interface with flexible access in several
dimensions:
Conclusions
We have presented some new technologies and their impact on computer science education. The benefits of
using the different applications will be most evident if they are integrated. The experience in other areas is that,
at the beginning, they simply support the current style of working, but they are gradually improved and give rise
to new tools and ways of working. The same experience will likely happen in the use of educational
technologies, giving rise to a new educational paradigm.